Niger: Anatomy of a Neotraditional Corporatist State

Abstract

The apparent failure of competitive party politics to take root in much of contemporary Africa has not curtailed efforts by military regimes to extend popular participation. Curiously, current scholarship does not adequately reflect the range of such initiatives.' While analysts periodically look for liberalizing trends in Africa's soldier states and are primed to consider the prospects for a return to civilian rule,2 few have examined participatory institutions under indeterminate military tutelage.3 Indeed, the literature reflects a tendency to assume that officers who tarry in government regard the modem bureaucratic army as a paragon for the organization of society as a whole.4 There is growing evidence to suggest, however, that in the future Africa's military rulers will have greater recourse to corporatist models of state-society relations as they seek to avoid a return to the barracks. Why this is so and what characteristics these structural alternatives are likely to assume are central questions addressed in this essay. Following a brief typology of corporatist systems, my purpose here is to relate the installation of corporatist modes of representation and policymaking in Africa to the quest for effectiveness and legitimacy by regimes faced with a crisis of governance which is inseparable from the international context of capitalism. This proposition will be developed more fully in a case study of neotraditional corporatism in Niger. Distinctions among several frequently occurring varieties of corporatism establish the parameters for elaborating the special case of neotraditional corporatism, a mode of governance that draws heavily on indigenous cultural patterns of authority, interest aggregation, and leader-follower relations as prime sources of legitimation. By examining Niger's recent experience with participation fostered through a five-tier hierarchy of development councils, we shall see how a corporatist-style representational system was installed by the military rulers in a two-step process. First the system was presented as transitional; it served to draw civilian constituencies into preparations for a return to constitutional government. Then, when Niger's domestic economy began wrenching from the shocks of a precipitous decline in the price and market for uranium, the existence of these purportedly transitional participatory structures preempted the formation of class-based parties or pluralist political alternatives. The. final section of our analysis, which links the onset of a crisis in Niger's political economy of development with the new politics of participation, explores the regime's recourse to corporatist intermediaries in the implementation of structural and policy reforms. Following a discussion that highlights the interactive relationship between economic policy dilemmas and the problems of governance, we conclude with a few theoretical and empirical observations about neotraditional corporatism and regime legitimation in Niger.